Then he asked after my parents.
“Are they giving you any trouble?” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means are they asking you what your plans are.”
“What is this? Some kind of third degree?”
Patrick said, “It’s getting hard to have a normal conversation with you, Elizabeth.”
“I’m sick and tired of being the center of everyone’s concern.”
“We like to see our Elizabeth making life-affirming gestures,” Patrick said. “We don’t like her to be cloaked away from life.”
“Last week I went to bed with a war correspondent,” I said. “Is that life-affirming enough for you?”
“Did you?” asked Patrick in a tone of total condescension. When I didn’t answer, he asked again.
“None of your fucking business,” I said.
“Really, Elizabeth. It would be a good thing for you to mess around a little more.”
“I can’t see why we’re having this conversation, Patrick. I didn’t go messing around with anyone, for your information, but I can’t stand this constant picking over me.”
He put his arm around me. “A little hostility is better than nothing at all. When I came in, you looked like the last day. I only goaded you a little, to get you going. Now, if you would give some thought to getting out of your jeans and into some respectable clothes, I’d take you out for a very lush meal.”
He grinned sweetly, and I felt a pang of pure rage.
“I’m not some psychological experiment. I won’t be power-played. Goddammit, Patrick, what do you think I am?”
He endured this, still grinning. A couple of weeks between us and he had lost both his casualness and his stiffness. Patrick, when he wasn’t being formal or offhand, was simply comfortable, and in any of those states he wasn’t approachable. He was as opaque and standoffish as vitreous china.
He said, “I hate to see you looking so closed off. I only wanted to stir you up. I figured you must have been through some recent bad times. Go get dressed and I’ll apologize over dinner.”
At a quiet restaurant with plush banquettes, we finished off a bottle of burgundy. Throughout the meal, Patrick was at me: he led the conversation like a dancing master, and by the time we got to coffee, we were earnestly on the subject of Max Price’s book. Not one personal word was said. We didn’t talk about Sam or family or ourselves. We talked about work, and Patrick smiled his smug and impish smiles. He wasn’t like Patrick at all, although he was enormously pleased with himself. After dinner, he saw me home and it was the first time since Sam died that I did not get ritually kissed good night. He said, “One of my colleagues has a darkroom, so I’ll call you next week after I develop the pictures and I wouldn’t turn down an invitation for dinner.” Then he was gone.
What I felt when he left was a mixture of anger, gratitude, and puzzlement. Patrick got the jump on you, I thought, which wasn’t fair, but on the other hand, he had gotten me out of an awful state of despair. My dinner with him had been actively enjoyable. He had made me angry enough to shout. He had taken me out into the world, at least for the evening, that devious and secret operator.
A week later he called to say that the photographs were ready and that he would very much like to have roast chicken and steamed escarole, if I didn’t mind, and I didn’t.
If I had thought about it, I would have expected the photos in a manila envelope, but Patrick brought them in a black cardboard folio tied with black cotton ribbon.
“I know you don’t like to be the center of everyone’s concern, but there you are,” said Patrick.
I opened the folio under the light, and when I looked at the prints, there was something about them I could not define. They ran from the mawkish to the hostile to the sorrowful to a big, open smile, and some of them had no expression at all. It seemed to be a record of everything I was capable of, and it shocked me. They were black-and-white photos, but the light in them looked sweet, like that honey-colored light you see on white marble in museums with skylights. When I looked through them again, I could not recognize the self I saw, the self I knew or thought I knew. In anthropology you learn that some primitive tribes think the camera takes your soul away, and I could see why. I felt that my soul had been not only taken away, but also given back to me.
“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” Patrick said. “My best work.” All I could do was nod. Then he closed the cover, tied the ribbons, and asked for his dinner.
He still had his high spirits. In fact, he was positively jaunty, but he was restless too. Over coffee, he told me that Sara had gone to Paris.
I said, “For a vacation?”
“For a year,” he said. “Maybe two.” I felt as if an anvil had been thrown at me.
“She told me to tell you she was sorry not to have called, but she was in Boston and then in Chicago, and then she had to do a crash translation.” He poured himself another cup of coffee and the light gleamed off his gold cuff links.
“Don’t you care?”
“She’s always wanted to live in Paris,” Patrick said.
“I thought you two were fixed.”
“We were fixed to unfix, when we wanted to.”
“I thought you were going to get married one of these days.”
“Sara and I wouldn’t ever have married,” Patrick said.
“Then why did you hang around so long?”
“We weren’t made for permanence,” Patrick said. “We got along very well, but for all the wrong reasons. We appealed to each other’s sense of finiteness, and we both knew it. She’s been planning to go to Paris for a year or so.”
This was not information I wanted to have. It disturbed my sense of things. Sara and Patrick were as permanent as a landmark building, and the fact that they could no longer be considered coupled scared me.
Patrick made a fire and I did the dishes, discovering in the process that my hands were shaking slightly, but I didn’t know why. My father, when I was young, once described me to a woman who doted on me as the most self-conscious child he had ever known, and I still was. Deep in my heart, I knew I had the goods on me. I knew what I was all about but why was I standing in a kitchen feeling shaky? I had kept Patrick pegged in my mind as unapproachable and private, and when he was around, I made sure he stayed that way. Now he had hit me with a piece of hard information and I was in danger of smashing one of the nice crystal wineglasses some well-heeled crony of my parents had forked over as a wedding present.
Patrick pulled up two armchairs in front of the fire and put a hassock between them to rest our feet on. We drank our coffee and Patrick cut apple slices and threw the peels into the fire. It was my turn to do some asking, but I balked. I didn’t want to know what went on between him and Sara, so we sat quietly until Patrick asked if he could put on some music. We listened to Boccherini with our feet up. Patrick sat there quietly, not smiling, but smoothed out. The room smelled of wood smoke and apple. The light from the fire played over his face. His hair fell onto his forehead and he looked not sleepy, but contemplative.
“If everyone sat in front of a fire once a week,” he said, “the people who make tranquillizers would go out of business.”
I said, “You can always come over here and have a fire, if you want.”
“That’s very polite of you, and I may take you up on it, now that the crunch is over at work.”
“That’s fine with me,” I said.
“I’m quite sure it’s not fine,” said Patrick. “You don’t want someone running in and out of your home lighting fires. I’ll wait for a formal invitation.”
“You don’t need a formal invitation.”
“Yes I do,” said Patrick. “Now give me my photos. It’s time to go home.”
“I thought those were for me.”
“Of you,” said Patrick. “Not for you. Those are mine.”
The next day I sat at my table in the stacks reading under the desk lamp. My pil
e of three-by-five cards was growing daily, and I had gone through several legal pads. But I wasn’t thinking about chamber music in America. I was thinking about Patrick or, rather, trying not to. Something had changed between us, or within him, and I didn’t know what it was or what difference it made. I took Patrick seriously, and it affected me. Patrick, after all, was the deep one, according to family myth, the deep and private one. I knew his good opinion meant a lot to me. I knew I had it, but I didn’t know why. He made me shy, but the most self-conscious child my father had ever seen, the More Life Widow of the More Life Kid, was more than shy. She was panicked.
When the rug is swept out from under you, you hang for an instant between standing and falling, and for that instant, there is nothing solid or dependable in the world: if you lose your balance, you lose everything. Sitting there making my notes, listening to the shuffle of books being arranged on the carts, to two library workers having a whispered fight about the basketball game, it occurred to me that thinking about Patrick without Sara upset me considerably, and it did not satisfy anything to think that my reaction was only to a rearrangement in the normal order. But if that wasn’t the reason, what was? I had no answer to give myself, so I went back to my research, with the shaky feeling you have when you get out of a small plane after several hours in the air.
13
Henry Jacobs and Max Price had been friends all their lives. They had grown up together in Chicago, had gone to college together, and when they traveled they sent each other what they called “loony postcards.” These postcards contained either cryptic messages or dopey greetings and had pictures of golden porcupines or Dungeness crabs or cows wearing bonnets or natives having a lobster race or can-can girls from the Follies. If you knew Max or Henry well enough, they would drag out their postcards for you, if things got dull.
When Henry came to New York, Max invited me for dinner. His wife was in New Haven for a Russian seminar, so we were left at the mercy of the Prices’ housekeeper, Fritzie Bettes, a middle-aged woman from Kentucky, who felt, Max told me, that she was the only competent person alive and that, without her, the Prices, her husband, and countless others would decline on the spot. If she baked a pie at home, she put another in the oven for the incompetent Prices. Since Max was having company for dinner and Mrs. Price was out of town, Fritzie Bettes had left a roast in the oven, potatoes and string beans on the stove, and one of her pies as well as precise printed instructions on when to put the light under what and how to properly serve. As I came in, she was leaving. She wore an old wool turban and had a cigarette smoldering at the corner of her mouth.
“Goodbye, Max,” she said. “See that you do everything according to the book.”
Max introduced us. “These men,” she said to me, and left.
Max took me into the living room, where Henry was having a drink and watching the evening news. He stood to kiss me and said, “How’s Patrick?”
“Very charged up,” I said.
“He’s a terrific find,” Henry said. “The law professor’s dream.” Henry couldn’t talk about either Sam or Patrick without making a brief speech, and his statement of the evening was that Sam was lovable, but Patrick commanded love. The effect of this on me was a great desire to have the subject changed. My feelings about Patrick included hostility, fear, and suspicion in equal measure. He took me to the movies. He made me play all the themes and variations in a Mozart rondo that had taken his fancy. He teased and provoked and insulted, and darted around like a gnat, caught up in his own good mood. I put up with this because I owed it to him, because I was lonely, and because I was waiting for my sudden evil feelings to fly away and leave me and Patrick level again. But his good spirits ran very close to smugness, I felt, and his casual revelation about Sara’s departure ran close to the sinister. Furthermore, his provocations were effective. He got a solid reaction out of me, and while he pulled me out of true despair, all he left me with was fright. When I stopped to think about it, which was as infrequently as my relentless mind would allow, I realized that my reactions didn’t make much sense. He was only my brother-in-law, my quasi-pal, who led a life of his own and was kind enough to want to tease a sorrow-stricken sister-in-law out of melancholy.
But the subject was changed. The evening news was over and the three of us went into the kitchen to see what wonders Fritzie Bettes had wrought.
“After Fritzie’s been here, it doesn’t seem to be our kitchen anymore,” Max said. “We’re waging a proprietary war with her. We put things away, and she comes and puts them where she thinks they ought to be. When we finally find what we need, we put it back and wait for her to undo it. It’s all very affable, though. See if you can find a large white platter. It was on the top of the icebox, but God only knows where she’s put it.”
Finally, we sat to dinner, and Max and Henry launched into a brisk conversation about wine prices. After that we got down to serious eating, and during a lull in the conversation Max said, “Now, Olly. I didn’t invite you here just to see Henry. We have some business to discuss.”
“What business?”
“Well, you’ve done wonderful work for me and I think it’s time you got out of the library and into the musical world a little.”
“I’m only an amateur,” I said.
“That doesn’t matter,” Max said. “You’re a serious person and there’s a lot you could do. Now Henry and I have been discussing this behind your back and here’s what we thought. There’s a musical foundation that sponsors the Hamilton Conservatory—one of the smaller ones. It’s in New Hampshire, and they meet at the end of the summer. It’s by invitation or recommendation only, so it’s quite an elite group. Henry and I would like to recommend you. Besides, they have a wonderful small library and you could do some work for me. What do you say?”
I didn’t say anything. There I sat between two kindly men in their sixties who were arranging life for my betterment. I said I’d think it over and thanked them. Then Max mentioned that Patrick was stopping by for coffee, and a black curtain of adolescent fury came flapping over my eyes. Suddenly, Max and Henry were not kindly mentors but strangers, blind to what was brewing inside me as I sat politely at their table. In that company, I was only a nice-looking girl, doing competent research, not some roiling teen queen working up to some piercing hostility. Why was Patrick coming for coffee? It seemed to me that was all he ever did. He showed up, like some awful dog who took a liking to you and stuck to your side. I was going to be plagued all my days by Patrick appearing after dinner. If I moved to Tashkent and lived in a yurt, Patrick would appear out of the desert for Turkish coffee. And Max and Henry would stop by to see if I had made any musicological notes on the flute patterns of the local tribesmen. I was deeply angry and ashamed.
But when Patrick appeared, for about three minutes I wasn’t angry at all. The thought of him and his being were two different things. He was courtly and charming, and when I looked at him from my end of the table I realized how wonderful he was to look at.
What was boyish in Sam’s face missed being boyish in Patrick’s. His eyes were not the wide, hell-bent eyes of someone let out of prep school for the afternoon. He wasn’t at all cherubic, as Sam had been. In profile, he looked noble, but rough, and his cheekbones weren’t flat like Sam’s, but arched. His hair was wavier than Sam’s, and his face was so mobile you could have known the story of a movie by watching Patrick watch it. When he smiled—which wasn’t often, although he grinned—he was another man. It was a smile with a lot of resonance.
I hated him. I hated his smugness. I hated the way he kept himself a secret and sprang things on you. I hated the fact that he told you his conclusions but not how he came to them. I hated the air he had of having an underground, covert life plan that made perfect and elegant sense to him and might be revealed when his perfect sense of time told him he was right to speak. I hated being seen through or having anyone think they could see through me. I hated being under his scrutiny. For all his beautiful smile
, what I wanted was not to be understood, but to be left alone—by Patrick specifically. It would have filled me with pleasure to aim a solid right cross at his lovely chin and watch him reel backward in his chair.
But I was a civilized girl in a civilized household. We drank our coffee, sipped our brandy, and talked about the government. When it was time to go, the men shook hands, and I kissed my aged mentors.
Out on the street, Patrick hailed a taxi.
“I can get my own cab,” I said.
“It might be my cab I’m flagging.”
“I’m taking the subway. See you.”
Patrick said, “Are you sure you want to take a subway yourself at this hour of the night?”
I turned on him, truly gripped by rage.
“Goddammit, Patrick. I’m sick of having you and everyone else treat me like a cripple. I’m sick of having everything arranged. Why can’t you just leave me alone?” A big checker cab stopped at a light and I ran for it, leaving Patrick standing alone on the corner, briefcase in hand.
When I got home, I found in my mailbox an envelope containing a duplicate set of Patrick’s photographs of me. I perused them to see if I could find some fault and add a little fuel to my anger. But there weren’t any faults. They had been taken with an eye of serious affection, which, in my hateful state, made me feel set upon and condescended to.
Venting rage gives a nice temporary glow, but the aftermath is bitter. I could have consoled myself by thinking that Patrick had no feelings to hurt, but it wasn’t so. He was filled with propriety and caution, but that only looks like coldness at a long, long distance. One of life’s terrors is to be under the thumb of something incomprehensible, and I was. I had been rude to my brother-in-law, who was all kindness. I imagined him standing on the corner watching me fling my rageful self into the taxi and drive off. I imagined that he was thinking how lucky his family was to have had its connection with me broken; that I was an ungrateful, hysterical girl.
Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object Page 11